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What's the most most mysterious bug you've ever encountered that later turned out to have a trivial explanation?
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Oh I have a great one. It's like a locked-room mystery. Developing a PlayStation 2 game. Test builds are burned on DVD. Big demo tomorrow, so I set everything up in the demo room (PS2 devkit, demo disc) and test it. Everything works great!
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Come back in the morning. I am ex-QA and paranoid, so go in early to test again. Game is busted. Symptom: Any physics object (think crates and other shit that flies around due to explosions) flies for a second then freezes in space. Like, hangs weirdly in mid-air.
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Rather than bouncing around as I expect. I have never seen this behavior before. Same devkit, same build on same disc. Devkit has no internet connection. Totally weird and unexpected bug. I am totally stumped.
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Long story short (here's the trivial explanation) - turns out the trial period expired on the physics middleware we were using. The devkit rolled over to Jan 1st or whatever. The behavior of the middleware in "expired" mode was to simulate objects for one second, then stop.
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Yup, but could never ship with it, which is why I guess it was OK for them. Plus it was pretty uncommon for consoles to be networked in the PS2 days!
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